Love Outside the Human Soul
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Eryximachus — ἱκανῶς ἀπετέλεσε, δεῖν ἐμὲ πειρᾶσθαι τέλος ἐπιθεῖναι τῷ λόγῳ. τὸ μὲν γὰρ διπλοῦν εἶναι τὸν ἔρωτα δοκεῖ μοι καλῶς διελέσθαι· ὅτι δὲ οὐ μόνον ἐστὶν ἐπὶ ταῖς ψυχαῖς τῶν ἀνθρώπων πρὸς τοὺς καλοὺς ἀλλὰ καὶ πρὸς ἄλλα πολλὰ καὶ ἐν τοῖς ἄλλοις, τοῖς τε σώμασι τῶν πάντων ζῴων καὶ τοῖς ἐν τῇ γῇ φυομένοις καὶ ὡς ἔπος εἰπεῖν ἐν πᾶσι τοῖς οὖσι, καθεωρακέναι μοι δοκῶ ἐκ τῆς ἰατρικῆς, τῆς ἡμετέρας
did not finish it adequately, so it was necessary for me to try to put an end to the argument. For that Love is double seems to me a fine distinction; but he is present not only in the souls of men, toward the beautiful, but also toward many other things, and in other things too — in the bodies of every living creature, and in what grows out of the earth, and, so to speak, in everything that exists — this I think I have observed from medicine, our own...
Continuing directly from 185e, where it has fallen to Eryximachus to give Pausanias's speech a proper ending, he confirms Pausanias's division of Love into two but adds an observation of his own from medicine: Love is not confined to human souls chasing the beautiful — it runs through animal bodies, growing things, and, he says, nearly everything that exists.
Eryximachus signs off on Pausanias's division without a fight — Love is double, he says, and rightly divided — then immediately widens it past anything Pausanias meant. The hinge word for that widening, hōs epos eipein, is a small piece of self-quotation: épos and eipeîn both come from the same old root for speaking (the one behind the aorist ‘I said,’ eîpon), so the idiom literally means ‘to say the word, as one might say the word.’ It is a hedge built out of a repetition, and Eryximachus reaches for it at exactly the moment his claim stops being modest: Love, he is about to say, is in the bodies of every animal, in every growing thing, in nearly everything that is. It is Eryximachus, mid-sentence, showing the caution of a man about to overreach.
The verb he uses for Pausanias's own contribution, dielesthai, 'to divide,' is the ordinary word for cutting something into its parts — the same operation Plato will later formalize as diairesis and build a method on, in dialogues like the Sophist. Here it does modest work: Pausanias correctly split one thing into two. Eryximachus's own move is a different kind of expansion, taking a distinction meant for human souls and human lovers and finding it, he claims, in the body of every animal and in whatever grows from the ground. Diotima's speech, still several turns away, will make a comparable move at a much higher pitch, climbing from one body to every body to Beauty itself. Eryximachus reaches for the same universal claim first, working from his own trade, medicine, rather than from philosophy.
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